I am lying in a surprisingly large and very white, bright glass-walled room in the CCU (the coronary intensive care unit) of our local hospital. Through these walls I can see several people who look like nurses and doctors seated at a long desk outside my glass box, staring at computer monitors. It’s action central out there, where staff can observe and monitor every heart patient, each of us in one of the glass boxes.

I can see assorted tubes, lines and beeping machines surrounding my bed or attached to my body. Two nurses are looking down at me, one on either side of my hospital bed, closely examining my right wrist. They are checking the wound that has been opened up there in order to insert a catheter through the radial artery, up my arm, around the bend of my shoulder, and into my beating heart. I find it oddly touching that each of these women is gently holding one of my hands. I feel like weeping, and so I do.

I have no more pain. No more pain crushing my chest or radiating down my left arm. No more of the increasingly debilitating symptoms I’ve been suffering for the past two weeks. If anything, I’m simply feeling surprised. I have had a heart attack. I HAVE HAD A HEART ATTACK! I, Carolyn Thomas, have had a frickety-frackin’ heart attack. . .Continue reading →

Dr. William Bestermann, in reviewing his own 40+ year career as a physician, now concludes that, in all of medicine, “there is no better example of the disconnect between what we know and what we do than in the case of women with coronary artery disease.” I’m a woman who has survived a widowmaker heart attack, and now lives with coronary microvascular disease, and I’ve only been writing about such sentiment for eight years. As Dr. B. explains bluntly:

“Every other week, I see a woman who has had symptoms of coronary artery disease and has been told that the problem is her esophagus – or worse – depression or anxiety. She is told in effect: ‘Go home, take your anti-anxiety drugs, you will be fine!’ What she has been told is often wrong – too often, dead wrong!” Continue reading →

As I’ve repeatedly insisted, my Heart Sisters blog readers are the smartest, kindest, sharpest and best-looking readers out there in the blogosphere. As part of my Dear Carolyn series of posts featuring my readers’ unique stories about becoming a heart patient, this one involves a plot twist that, sadly, sounds maddeningly familiar.

We used to hear coronary heart disease described as “hardening of the arteries”, or atherosclerosis. I pictured this as some kind of clogged drain under an old sink, plugged up with years of disgustingly hard gunk. But it turns out that only about three out of every 10 heart attacks are actually caused by this kind of hardened coronary artery blockage.

The rest of us can blame soft, vulnerable and unstable plaque within the walls of those arteries. This may also help to explain (as I’ve written about here and here) why you can have a “normal” cardiac test one month, and be back in hospital the following month with a heart attack. Here’s how that can sometimes happen, according to experts at the Texas Heart Institute: Continue reading →

Do you know the difference between a medical condition that’s underdiagnosed, and one that’s misdiagnosed? I thought you’d never ask. . . Underdiagnosis is a failure to recognize or correctly diagnose a disease or condition, especially in a significant proportion of patients, as in: “Heart disease in women is still being underdiagnosed compared to our male counterparts.”(1) But misdiagnosis is an incorrect, partial or delayed diagnosis of one individual’s illness or other medical problem, as in: “I left the Emergency Department with a misdiagnosis of acid reflux despite my textbook heart attack symptoms of central chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain down my left arm.”

The trouble is this: the more that misdiagnosis happens to individual women, one after another, the more likely we are to continue seeing underdiagnosis of women heart patients as a whole. Thank you to these heart patients who shared their own experiences of surviving a misdiagnosis: Continue reading →

♥ For women living with heart disease, from the unique perspective of CAROLYN THOMAS, a Mayo Clinic-trained women's health advocate, heart attack survivor, blogger, author, speaker here on the west coast of Canada

♥ Information for the general public, heart patients or their family members, health professionals, and all students of the heart

the presentations

♥ Learn more about my recent and upcoming presentations – including my annual HEART SMART WOMEN presentationin Victoria, BC Canada on Tuesday, February 26th! Free admission, open to all, but pre-registration is required (this class is always full with a waiting list). ♥

the news

♥ The first WomenHeart Support Group program in Canada is being held at Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, BC on the third Wednesday evening of each month. Any woman living with heart disease is invited to attend. For more info, email Rose at: rlopetrone (at) shaw (dot) ca

♥Free Virtual Support Groups offered by WomenHeart: The National Coalition for Women With Heart Disease, scheduled throughout each month on three specific topics: Heart Failure, Atrial Fibrillation or General Heart Disease in Women. Check the current schedule to sign up.